[coreboot] How come the community meeting is hosted by proprietary software?

[Stefan Reinauer]

* Patrick Georgi via coreboot <coreboot at coreboot.org> [170317 16:05]:
> 2017-03-17 15:50 GMT+01:00 Juliana Rodrigues <juliana.orod at gmail.com>:
> > that I know uses jitsi: https://meet.jit.si
> > It's MIT, but works very well.
> Thanks for the pointer.
> 
> We already tried jitsi, but I think without the bridge service (which
> only seems to exist for about a year).
> So, something to re-evaluate, but the last time we tried "works very
> well" was the opposite of our experience due to bandwidth
> requirements.

To shed some light on this, there are several types of issues we have
encountered with this sort of software:

 - some software works really great for 1:1 video conferencing but does
   not scale when you are trying to have 15-20 people on a call. So
   unless you ran 20 people meetings successfully, "It works very well"
   might just cover a really different use case.

 - The software has to work on a variety of misconfigured (ahem) open
   source OSes and distributions, mainly by knowing about quirks of the
   various OSes / distributions and working around them. We have tried
   a number of solutions that ended up with half of the people not
   hearing the other half for various reasons.

If you folks are interested in working on deploying these types of
systems or fixing these sorts of issues, please, I advise you to join
one of the open source projects that aims at creating video / audio
conferencing software in the free software realm. These projects are in
desperate need of great engineers to make them usable for cross planet
conferencing on a larger (10-20ppl) scale. Do we want to solve these
problems in the coreboot project, or on the coreboot mailing list? No.
This project is all about booting computers. So as others here have
mentioned, please save your (and everybody elses) time and energy for
exactly that.

> Patrick
> (note to all so I don't have to sound like a grumpy, broken record: Is
> it FOSS and reasonably popular? Then it's rather likely that we
> already tried it)

Or, as a dear friend of mine likes to say: This ain't our first rodeo
:-)

All the best,

Stefan